Please revisit the privacy policy on this site regularly as Curiosity Creek is a work in progress and thus the policy may require updating or additions from time to time. The Curiosity Creek Web site is in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) . This act went into effect in April of 2000 and was designed to protect the rights of children and promote their safety when online. Parents and educators can read the full text of the law.

The Curiosity Creek site has been designed to provide a safe and supportive environment in which children can exercise their curiosity, learn or practice inquiry skills for 21st century learning, and express their creativity in the products of their research. Privacy policies even on children's sites are often difficult to read and understand. We will continue to re-work our privacy policy so that it uses language that children (grade 2 level with parent or educator facilitation) can understand, and includes enough examples to clarify understanding. This site does not sell any commercial products to children or adults.

How We Use Information About You

To assure you that we aim to protect your privacy rights, we want you to know exactly how the site treats your information, whether you are a child or an educator:

First of all, many of the activities do not require any kind of information about you in order to participate. These activities include most interactive games, coloring, drawing, reading digital storybooks, and viewing videos.

When information about children is collected such as artwork or stories submitted to Curiosity Creek, the information we collect is non-personal. For example, we would only ask for a first name, never a last name. We may also the age and general location of where you live (only city and state, never your address or telephone number).

This non-personal information, if you and your parents/teachers choose to share it, would be the only information displayed on the site because it is not considered personally identifiable. Personally identifiable information means that someone would be able to contact you by mail, telephone or email, for example.

We may occasionally collect your email address which is personal information but we will not save it. The reason for this is so that you can participate in an activity that requires it. Sometimes, it helps to have a few examples: If you send a question to one of the characters on Curiosity Creek, we would ask for your e-mail address so that the character could reply to you in an email postcard.

If you contact the author of the site because you have questions, we would also use your email address to respond to you.

If you want to send a postcard to a friend from Curiosity Creek, we would only need your first name and the email address of the person to whom you will send the postcard. We do not keep this information. We only need it to send the postcard and then we delete or erase the information.

Sometimes, because games often involve tracking your score, you might create a username and password. Only use your first name or a pretend name. We will not collect any information that will identify you personally. We currently do not offer games that include keeping track of previous scores, but we may develop such games in the future.

If you are an educator submitting a lesson plan or teaching idea, however, our policy would be to provide full credit including first and last name unless otherwise requested by the educator.

We will never share any information about you with a third party. A third party, for example, could be an advertiser. We will not do this.

How We Protect You

We always want you to feel safe and secure when you visit Curiosity Creek. For that reason:

If you select any links to other sites when you are in the children's areas of Curiosity Creek, we will let you know that you have selected a link that will take you away from Curiosity Creek to another site. You can then choose to go back to Curiosity Creek if you change your mind. You may want to ask your parent or teacher about whether to visit another site. We will let you know a little about the site that you are about to visit, too. The Parent and Educators' section of the site, however, uses direct links.

Since one of the inquiry objectives of Curiosity Creek is to introduce children to evaluation skills, several of the site's activities and/or teacher suggestions will relate to looking for clues as to whether information found on the Internet can be trusted.

Whenever funding or underwriting is received for helping to develop Curiosity Creek and this site, we will identify the sponsors and provide background information on them.

Cookies for Collecting General Information

We may use "cookies" which are tiny text files set on your computer to collect general information. This information is used only as anonymous aggregate data. Aggregate means "summary," that is we want to know about how all visitors experience the site and so we summarize or total the information. Anonymous means that we don't know who the information belongs to. We don't collect any personal information with cookies. We use cookies to determine the number of visitors to different sections of Curiosity Creek, to know how much time was spent visiting, for tracking popular activities, remembering preferences, and to make sure the site is working properly. We never use this information to track or record information about individuals. You can feel secure that we do not store any personal information in a cookie even if you provided your email address as part of an activity. We never sell this information or share it for commercial purposes. You can turn off cookies on your computer, if you wish.

How You Can Contact Us

Please feel free to contact Dr. Marilyn Arnone if you have any questions about the Privacy Policy for Curiosity Creek. She can be reached by email at mparnone@syr.edu. The privacy policy will be undergoing periodic reviews to improve and update.